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How do we integrate the "wonderful" parts with all the other parts of our BPD partners (and family)? Is there any info to help us do this?

I struggle with this every day and I feel crazy sometimes, trying to get a sense of who my husband is, who I am trying to relate to. I also have the same issue with my stepdaughter and sister-in-law.

Hi Daisy   

What do you mean by "integrate"?

By Integrate I mean finding a way to see my partner as a whole person. Giving this more thought I see myself struggling between denial and acceptance of my husband's BPD. I spent 30 years under the illusion that I was the less emotionally healthy person and that he was a really nice guy with lots of fans.

Is he any of the things I thought he was before I recognized that he is dealing with BPD? I feel like seeing the BPD behaviors casts a shadow on all of his behaviors.

Does that make any sense?

I'd like to help but perhaps someone else can chime in here, it doesn't seem familiar to me. When you mean finding a way to see your partner as a whole person, is there a specific part him can't you "see"? To check my understanding, is it that you seem to have had a long time to "look" at what appears to now be a false image (the more "healthy" person you spoke of), but now you're finding it difficult to "see" the reality of this more detailed characteristic (the BPD traits you now know about)?

Yes, that must be a big part of it. I guess I've been more caught up in denial these past eighteen months than I realized. Having thought  slept on it I'm seeing my question as a step towards acceptance of hime as he is. Having read Avita's description of the emptiness pwBPD feel I've just now been able to see that intellectually my husband still is who he always has been but that he has never really had a "self" that I could connect with and rely on - spiritually and emotionally. So I'm starting to see the parts of him and that helps me put together some sense of who he is on the whole.

Whether this makes sense or not, this site and the people on it have helped me with this question - and given relief to months of confusion and anger.

Thanks.

I see. I like how you have described the intellectual, spiritual and emotional aspects of your act of "observation" of him. I can't speak of Avita's post, yet perhaps these three aspects not catching up to each other could be linked to your unease. In this way, our discussion makes more sense to me. Indeed when I discovered how my ex BP operated, it was mostly the intellectual part of this triad that was informed. Then, in the manner of "understanding can lead to forgiveness" (I forgot who wrote the platitude), the spiritual and emotional "catch up". This other quote describes the process slightly more, addressing the loose ends, and I think is therefore excellent.

"Understanding is often a prelude to forgiveness, but they are not the same, and we often forgive what we cannot understand (seeing nothing else to do) and understand what we cannot pardon."

Though it's mostly applicable when BPs do hurtful things. I hope your mind and spirit find peace:)

It makes perfect sense to me.  Is the professionally successful woman I fell in love with the same woman who bounces from job to job and has regressed in her career during the course of our marriage?  Is the woman I'd find in the kitchen cooking breakfast for me in the nude on a Saturday when we first started dating the same woman who sleeps till noon while I make house and spend mornings on the weekends alone?  Is the woman who told me she loves me forever and wants to add to our family soon the same woman who left our family after an argument in which she drove home drunk and picked a fight with me?  In the same week? 

This has been the hardest part of therapy:  the fun-loving, successful, witty, sex-bomb, gorgeous, incredible woman I fell in love with inhabits the same body as the anxiety-riddled, listless, dull, sexless - but still gorgeous - woman I am married to (for however much longer) now, but the "real" version of my wife is almost certainly somewhere in between, and it may well be that she gravitates towards the latter.

And that's what makes this so impossible.  As I've said in another thread, were this a girlfriend or a fiancee I wouldn't be on this board and would be much, much farther along in the grieving process.  For better or worse, she is my wife and we have a family, and I just want her to get the help she needs to reunite us and stop the psychic damage she's inflicting on our children, herself, and me. 

All the things that drew me to her appear to be an on/off switch in her brain:  she moved in with me almost immediately and SHE asked ME to marry her only a few months into our relationship.  It was truly like being on the best of the best drugs with her.  But, once we tied the knot, things started to scale back - as one would expect after years of being together and transitioning from chemical love to adult love - and then inexorably marched towards where we are today.  Was any of it real?  The more I think about it, the more I can't help but believe it was all part of the dance.  She has core things she is, but those core things are few and far between, and, again, what brought us together is what tore us apart, because in many, many ways I was sold a bill of goods about who she was and what she wanted.

Not sure if any of that helped but I feel you loud and clear.